Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I rise briefly to remind your Lordships of my experience from 1983 to 1992 in our former polytechnic sector. All the degrees in that sector were validated by the Council for National Academic Awards, upon which I was the sole representative of commerce, and of which I was the honorary treasurer from 1985 until it was wound up in 1992.
In those days, the CNAA and the polytechnics had responsibility to the Secretary of State for all our teacher training courses. When I managed to infiltrate myself on to the relevant committee, I was shocked to find that our mission statement was to “permeate the whole curriculum” with issues of gender, race and class. Perhaps that is where much of our political correctness comes from today. I was also shocked to find that, generally speaking, our social sciences departments were weak and dominated to an unhealthy extent by the serious left. For instance, we favoured external examiners in these soft subjects who declared on their CVs that they were Marxists. I fear that our students were given a very unbalanced education.
In 1992, the polytechnics were given their own royal charters, were thus miraculously turned into universities in their own right, and the CNAA was abolished. I have no idea how their social science departments have performed since, but I bet that some of them are still not much good today.
Our last polytechnic experiment in 1964 consisted of taking the former technical colleges, which were excellent, and bolting on the new poly departments, which were mostly not. One obvious problem was finding enough good-quality social science lecturers to come into the new system of 29 polytechnics. However, throughout the 28 years of that experiment, most  of the technical departments—engineering and so on—managed to stick to their guns and offer their students a rigorous education. I imagine that many of them still do in their newish universities.
My plea to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the Government is to not make the same mistake again. If we need to address our technical skills gap—and we  clearly do—please let us be wary of doing it through another poly-technic experiment. Let us do it through encouraging the best technic departments to expand and be emulated elsewhere. If necessary, let us set up new and prestigious technical colleges, if we can find enough good teachers—I nearly said lecturers, but they should of course also be teachers. We should not let these be compromised by weak social sciences in the same institutions. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.